Two months ago Stanczyk produced an analysis of Genealogical Website rankings after reading the Eastmans Online Genealogy Network blog about one from Canada??. Since that time, I have been monitoring my own blog’s rankings every month to see how I have been progressing and I am very thankful for you, my good readers. But before we close out the 2011 year, I wanted to have a final Global Top 125 Genealogy Websites ranking. The current global rankings include a link to the prior ranking, so you can compare for yourself.

First off, let me say how I produced the survey. It is not like Family Tree Magazine’s Top 100 Genealogy Websites which “selects” their favorite 125 websites, by grabbing some from a variety of categories (African-American Genealogy, Jewish Genealogy, Big Genealogy Websites, etc.). Their breadth of “selections” is impressive and they range into reference websites too. Still every one of their selected websites is a valuable resource and the whole list could be used to form your own Genealogy Favorites (Bookmarks).

To arrive at my surveys, last survey and this current survey, I used Alexa.com as my source for rankings. I gathered websites from all over the world and I used the GLOBAL RANKING. This is why we, in the USA may have some disagreements, as Alexa.com also keeps a ranking within the local country. The American rankings for the USA websites tend to be much higher than the foreign regions for us. Likewise, in Canada or the UK, their local genealogy websites tend to rank higher than USA websites because they tend to use their local resources. But in the USA everyone is from somewhere else, so we use USA websites and genealogy websites from around the entire Globe to do our research. Finally, since I use Alexa.com for the rankings, I have to accept that they may not have considered a website that might actually be about genealogy as being about something else, because the website did not specify or because they described their website as something else. Also Alexa.com does a very poor job of ranking websites outside the USA/Canada/UK unless they write in English. To compensate (modestly), I did add in two Polish genealogical websites and included their global rankings in the survey. After all, this is a blog about Polish Genealogy and other musings. I also added in a few odds & ends, such the the US National Archives (even though not all of the site is not genealogically related — Alexa does not allow for me to select a sub-site within Archive.gov).

Findings

The new websites, seem to be the ones I added. Some of the older websites no longer had data, so we see some with a ranking of: 99,999,999. This is not an accurate ranking but it must be well beyond 30Million and may now be in the 100Million range and as such, Alexa.com now ignores it or at least does not keep its data.

Many of the top 50 Genealogy websites moved up and moved upwards a good bit. A very few of the Top 50 moved down slightly. So overall, it seems that Genealogy is becoming more popular (than all other websites in general). To give you some feel, this blog that you are reading right now, moved upwards some 6Million places. However, it only moved up four places on the Global Top 125 Genealogy Websites ranking.

In the Top 10, there was very little movement. Most notable, was Fold3.com (formerly Footnote.com), the recent Ancestry.com acquisition moved to number 9 (up from #10) and Eastmans Online Genealogy Network moved up to #10 (from 17). The Top 10 also has one of the new websites (NARA) and MyHeritage.com (#2 — one of those websites that Alexa.com had not counted as a genealogy website, but which we included this time).

Next Year

I will begin dropping website that are ranked at or above 20Million to allow room for some new websites and to keep the list to 125. Please send me an email about any website that I should investigate for inclusion.

I will publish the future Rankings on or about the 1st of: March, June, September, and December going forward.